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Alpha Phi Epsilon

“It involved acts of...‘waterboarding’, pushups with broken glass, a high pressure hose being stuck into mouths, excessive consumption of an alcoholic beverage described as ‘Jungle Juice’ that you drank until you were told to stop consuming, and randomly having eggs or cans of soda thrown at you.” — Hazing complaint described in police report

About this report

The newspaper requested the hazing complaints and internal communications used in this report through the state Freedom of Information Law in April after Binghamton University shut down all hazing activity. In July, BU provided the Press & Sun-Bulletin with 329 pages of material obscured almost in its entirety by redactions. The newspaper appealed to the State University of New York’s Albany office. In mid-August, the paper received 928 pages of material with only some material redacted, including the names of students and locations of incidents. The documents are available for review at Pressconnects.com/hazing.

As Binghamton University received dozens of complaints this spring that hazing was endangering students, school administrators felt powerless to stop it.

Police, too, faced similar constraints when they followed up on anonymous reports about harmful Greek life initiation rituals.

“Unfortunately we have not had a lot of luck prodding off-campus agencies to take any action,” BU Police Chief Timothy Faughnan wrote in an April 9 e-mail to administrators. “The problem is the secretive nature of hazing, and without any solid information, the local police are unable to do much.”

A Press & Sun-Bulletin review of 928 pages of complaints, internal Binghamton University e-mails, police reports and other documents received through the state Freedom of Information Law indicates that New York’s anti-hazing laws are barely enforceable, leaving BU — and perhaps other schools across the state — often helpless when it comes to protecting their students from off-campus hazing.

Brian Rose, BU’s vice president of student affairs, said the school has worked with Greek organizations to uncover details of the hazing allegations and hold students accountable in recent months.

Of the 53 active Greek organizations recognized by BU, 48 are in full standing. The other five include two under investigation, two with disciplinary warnings and one on probation.

“We have never failed to respond to any allegation of hazing,” Rose said.

But the documents obtained by this newspaper paint a clearer picture of what BU leaders and local law enforcement are up against.

• One Binghamton University student pledging for a fraternity reportedly suffered frostbite last year. Another developed a staph infection on his foot after he walked barefoot across sharp rocks and was told not to seek medical treatment. Other students reportedly were forced to vomit on each other, made to do push ups on broken glass or engage in dangerous drinking games.

• Other complaints state pledges were “treated like animals,” “getting beat every night,” and “dragged around the floor and (had) their clothes ripped off of them” as part of fraternity and sorority initiation rituals.

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• Some complaints say students were subjected to “water boarding,” a drowning simulation technique some consider torture.

• The most common complaint was sleep deprivation. In some cases, reports show, pledges were kept up until class the next morning.

With complaints piling in, BU shut down all sorority and fraternity pledging on April 11 due to “an alarmingly high number of serious hazing complaints.”

E-mails sent between administrators in the days before show they felt they had few options left.

Enforcement concerns

The complaint that led to Police Chief Faughnan’s April 9 e-mail came when a BU alumnus wrote to administrators on April 7 that someone pledging to Alpha Xi Delta was undergoing treatment so gruesome and disturbing she didn’t want to describe it in an e-mail.

Other students pledging to Sigma Alpha Mu and Alpha Pi Epsilon underwent rituals that resemble “slave treatment,” the complaint states.

Sunni Solomon, then BU’s Assistant Director of Greek Life, told administrators the school would have a problem acting on the information. All three groups, he said in an e-mail, are “unrecognized organizations that continue to function underground.”

“…I just received the email below and am not sure how to handle,” Solomon wrote to other administrators. “All groups named are unrecognized, meaning I have little (if any) input or effect on their behavior.”

Lloyd Howe, then BU’s Dean of Students, asked Solomon in an e-mail to contact police immediately.

“Although their organizations do not currently fall under University jurisdiction,” Howe wrote, “it sounds like the individual behaviors may constitute violations of University conduct code and possible violations of New York State Penal Law.”

Hazing is a class A misdemeanor under state criminal law.

But even when police did respond, they could do little.

In an interview last week, Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said Faughnan’s e-mail was the result of a miscommunication, and once it was worked out, city police followed up on the complaint soon afterward.

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On April 12, Sgt. Michael Senio visited the Conklin Avenue house of Alpha Pi Epsilon, also known as APES, and was faced with students who were uncooperative about giving their names or saying who was in the house, a police report states.

“From where the Sgt. was standing he could see into the basement and Sgt. Senio did see standing water and garden hoses which was reported to be used for ‘water boarding,’” the report states.

Senio, who is in charge of the Binghamton Police Department’s Community Response Team, “sternly warned” the residents to terminate hazing immediately, “and that if one is caught hazing, (an) arrest will be made,” according to the report.

Hazing charges were never filed.

A Press & Sun-Bulletin reporter and photographer who approached three men at the APES house last week to request an interview were asked to leave the property.

Cease and desist

Zikuski said the constraints police face enforcing hazing laws are no different from other crimes: officers need to identify a victim in order to press charges.

“It’s very limited what we can do if it’s an anonymous complaint,” he said. “With limited information, we’re not going to be able to do a whole lot.”

Zikuski said that report was the only, or one of the only, reports of a hazing incident that city police have received in the last couple years.

“If someone wants legitimate police action taken, we need to talk to the victim. And that’s not happening,” Zikuski said. “In all the years that I’m talking about, a victim has never come forward and said, ‘I was hazed at this location.’”

Hank Nuwer, a professor at Franklin College in Indiana who has written four books on hazing, said the difficulties of enforcing anti-hazing laws are not unique to Binghamton.

“There’s a lot of frustration,” Nuwer said. “We’ve got 44 laws out of 50 (states), but you’re looking at a handful that actually have any clout at all. The others at the bottom are symbolic.”

Those difficulties were illustrated in a separate complaint also sent to the school on April 7, when someone wrote anonymously that students were forced to hold hot coals until they burned their hands and to eat onions until they vomited on each other.

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Administrators reached out to Faughnan, who said there wasn’t much he could do.

“If someone…anyone is willing to talk with us, we would like that very much,” Faughnan told administrators April 10. “Our involvement (the police) would still possibly be limited if they are off campus, but we can at least get started. Otherwise, we are left with on-campus administrative action as an immediate measure.”

The next day, pledging was shut down.

Fallout

On Friday, after national media attention earlier in the week once again cast a harsh spotlight on Greek life at BU, more than 100 sorority and fraternity members gathered for an anti-hazing rally outside the school’s University Union.

A distinction needs to be made, Tau Alpha Upsilon president Claude Fong said, between the service-oriented sororities and fraternities recognized by the university and rogue groups like Alpha Phi Epsilon.

“We want to tell everyone that we don’t haze,” said Fong, 21. “The people that haze are the off-campus fraternities.”

Sorority and pledge initiations will be different when they begin again this spring, Rose said. The leadership of Greek organizations have signed administrative agreements that improve new-member programs. New-member education periods featuring anti-hazing programs are also in the works.

An external review of BU’s Greek life system “will begin shortly, and will result in additional reform recommendations,” Rose said. He did not provide details about what the external review will cover.

Nevertheless, the legal and administrative structures in place to prevent hazing have not changed since April. It is still explicitly prohibited by BU’s Code of Conduct, and still against state criminal law.

Speaking to the Binghamton University Council at its most recent meeting, Rose was candid about the challenges of enforcing those rules.

“The victims of hazing don’t see themselves as victims,” he said, and aren’t cooperative in investigations. The perpetrators deny their actions. The anonymous tipsters refuse to be part of investigations.

Ultimately, he suggested, the key is to promote values that work against hazing and degrading treatment of others.

“The only way to make real progress is to engage with our students,” Rose said.

But Nuwer, citing several recent hazing-related fatalities in states with weak legal protections for hazing victims, found reason to be more pessimistic.

“Unfortunately it takes a death,” he said, “for it to make a difference.”